I won’t bother describing anymore, sufficient to say the mentality was that how could I a simple peasant of gaming comprehend the whole of game design not having the knowledge they possess, and what could a mere subscriber know of anything concerning WoW when there are 9 million+ buying into such a trend? Gaming trends, especially combined with the business models you speak of are just the tip of the sword with what’s wrong with games these days. Unfortunately it’s so much easier just to hop on the band wagon, because then you don’t have to really think, and that is the point to my diatribe.

Of course the immediate question then: “Why are 11 million players still playing WoW?” Well, outside of Blizzard’s “fun with numbers”(tm), I would say MMOs hook into two things: 1) people’s desire to be better than other people. 2) People’s desire to collect things.

Those two aspects can keep people playing a game long after the mechanic has become boring to them. Afterall, RPGs are one of the few genres where no skill is required, just time. Given everything else in life takes some type of eureka moment or some type of honing of skills, it is very relaxing to know that if I put in X hours, I will be rewarded with Y. So, sure, this has a place, but it isn’t what I’m looking for in an MMO.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/29/ea-mythic-activision-world-of-warcraft-estimate-is-overblown/”

Not at all.

All that says is: if you’re a newb to making MMOs and you want to succeed on the highest level, then you have to have a lot of money ($100 million) to play ball. That’s not even an established fact, it’s just one guy’s opinion.

There’s nothing “broken” about anything. It costs a lot to jump right into the deep end, because you don’t have the team and the business structure in place. It costs a lot of money to do that stuff on the fly. Strangely enough though, you can be really successful if you have the financial commitment. Funcom spent supposedly only $25 million on AoC, and even though the game is a failure on a lot of levels, it’s still going to make back the investment quickly, and then go on to a long lifetime of making money. If Funcom had spent $50 million instead, it might have been a WoW killer and made hundreds of millions in profit.

How much money do you think S-E has made from FFXI at this point? With 400k-500k subscribers, they’re raking in cash on a massive scale on a business that long ago paid for itself. How much is EQ2 making despite being marginalized by bigger fish like WoW? A lot of people are making a lot of money even if they’re not leading the industry. Show me the non subscription games that are actually making this kind of profit. They don’t exist (yet).

@Drakiis: “DUMP THE TRENDS BECOME INNOVATIVE IF YOU WANT CASH.”

Fine, if you can accept innovation as being evolutionary, not revolutionary. The MMO industry’s biggest success comes from a MMO that refined a lot of long-established MMO mechanics in one game (and also rode a perfect storm of factors that led to an unexpected success).

The WoW-killer will probably be a version of WoW that you can play on a browser – not a revolution, but an evolution.

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/29/ea-mythic-activision-world-of-warcraft-estimate-is-overblown/

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/28/1651241

Back in June of 2006, I was asked to join a discussion on the IGDA Forums by a game designing friend of mine. Noticing I had a firm grip on sociology, ethics, philosophy, and psychology I soon found myself in the deep end of the pool being asked about things that we are only now just discussing in the gaming industry. After handing out my opinions like they were candy, I was quickly looked upon as a fruit cake by the designers who frequent that forum, and noticed I was unsupported in my viewpoints. Much of my statements revolved around a particular thread about WoW and it’s greatness, admittedly I am anti-WoW, but I must say that in my defense all of my statements were general and targeted for MMO’s overall.

A excerpts of previous conversations concerning this topic debated on entierly different forums follows;

“Originally Posted by AshenTemper
How is this any different than when EQ was the king, though? Granted, WoW emulates a lot of EQ but other games have been coming to light that go another route.

Yes, a lot of corporate money is backing the same model because they see that Vivendi (through Blizzard) basically has their own money printing press now. But you’d be surprised by how many companies realize that its silly to butt heads with WoW with the exact same game with a different candy shell.

Players, on the other hand, generally think that the game they love is the best game ever. And yet, year after year, they find new games to play.”

“Drakiis
It isn’t different, Vivendi/Blizzard did the exact same thing as Sony/Verant did in the day. Yet cloning is what seems to be happening Sean, many companies do emulate the same design to make a bundle of cash, gain a foothold in the market so opportunity opens the door for them and they can diversify later or obtain connections in the industry and gain lucrative deals for future projects whether MMO related or not. The trends flow in predictable measures, if companies see gamers responding in such force for a specific game then all other companies follow suit and unfortunately the companies look at the majority and the majority are being mislead because of the general ignorance associated with the typical “New Gamer” who doesn’t yet have a clue to the true potential of the medium. In essence game companies are responsible for influencing the trends because their grip on the communities color the perspectives of the gamers.

Now obviously as people do, we change, we evolve, learn and grow. Some gamers from WoW will do this, as has happened in the past. Take me, I wasn’t always this way. Shamefully as a child of everquest, I bought into their “vision” at first, and as I played I began to see things I had never noticed before even though they had always been there. When I caught my baptism by fire and discover Lum the Mad, it wasn’t long to see the disease and rot from within as Sony with iron grip controlled how the game was played and designed, since then the tidal wave of MMO’s flooding the market has shone me all the similarities of design. While each game is a measured dance to come into retail at specific times, to counter other games, or blow away the ruling king of games.

The companies just seem to be changing up small design aspects, when it is the big picture in question. They wrap it in new graphics, but this is illusionary, the graphic technology will always evolve as our industry improves it, how does that translate into a great game? Especially if it’s something that would happen no matter what game you play. EQ went through 4-5 graphic improvements alone while I played it and tweaked play and design hundreds of times, yet the core of the game always stayed the same. Get my meaning?

Game limits need to be avoided while in concept, and a whole rethinking is necessary on how MMO’s are done. Throw out the old tolkien playbook, and the D&D 1st edition rule books. Levels are flawed, grinds are weak, greedcentricity is negative and has a bad impact on community and is what makes pvp unacceptable to most carebear gamers and game designers because they want to keep their “uber happy stick of unemployment”. Players that realize all of this are the gold in the sunshine, but unfortunately games are now targeting all generations of players and many of them are not looking for any of these things because they don’t know that any of these things are more beneficial to what they are being force fed.

I agree with those statements if your looking at it as a structured business venture and from the perspective of a designer. While I am very certain that many of those in game development have their roots as game players something gets lost in the translation between “It’s my job” and “It’s my hobby”. Design from my perspective is not perfect and I am not so blind as to see that my opinions are more often then not in the wrong. I realize my knowledge in such areas is tenuous at best, but more likely nonexistent. Though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the social, psychological, and creative impacts felt by players as a whole with in the games design.

I agree that much of what I spoke of was as I said overly dramatic and carried little substance, however the the truth is still never the less prevalent, that games follow a tend and that trend is in question. Why else would your guild as well as all the other guilds I’ve come to admire and respect be waiting? Would not the perfect game have already been created if all that you say is true?

Is not the definition of the word creativity stem from being innovative, and does that not also mean doing something that has not been done? So given that, wouldn’t a game company or development house seek to improve something, or invent and create something that has never been seen instead of reach out and live off the work that has been previously done?

By following a trend, you have not been creative, you have not invented or improved the current industry standard, there by all your really accomplishing is pirating past achievements and resting on your laurels for the pursuit of money.

I realize it takes money to make money, though I believe there are as I initially stated other aspects to gaming that current design does not address very well, it is the social and psychological dynamics at play in a community. Something everyone here seems to all agree on. You want pvp, you want good guy verse bad guy, player justice, community, recognition, and player fame, a story driven by you or your guild, a dynamic living breathing world not a static re-spawn world tightly monitored for bad behavior or slightly off center from pc comments, you want guild verse guild, and epic explorable areas, combined with less grind and itemcentricity, you want player kingdoms. None of which can be accomplished without some risk great or small.

Will every attempt to innovate yield positive results? Probably not. Will it cost money? Undoubtedly so. Without such though, the world and games in general would be a very boring place. Just think of all the things in games or otherwise we wouldn’t have if people just followed the ebb and flow of design, if people concerned themselves more with the cost then the results, or if companies looked at the untold millions of revenue instead of making something unique.

I have heard that no MMO makes money in their first 1-5 years or better and some never fully recover invested interest, I understand that they are costly endeavors with many employees, and that no game is created in a vacuum or that no game can function without huge logistical support structures outside of the game itself.

I am merely commenting on game ideologies concerning the things players want and that design in general either completely ignores this point or doesn’t understand it. I am looking at the community aspects as well showing the fact that as a social game, with humanistic mentalities you can’t compartmentalize it using flawed industry standards that have been handed down since the beginning of time.

That creativity requires sacrifice, and the players know this apparently more than the game companies. By default players are a community and communities are often times linked directly with the game in a symbiotic relationship which reflects how well it’s received and by what success it generates. WE are paying the bill regardless of how minor or insignificant it may be, and if we had a game that wasn’t cloned or refurbished with a dynamic tool set success could all but be guaranteed and a game company could make a strong case for taking risks.

There are many companies out there with capital to spare, and they voraciously hold onto this to cover projects that in the past they never even participated in. They get this huge chunk of money and diversify, why? If I started a company making MMOs for PC, why would I diversify making say Xbox 360 games if I previously had no experience in it? When I could use the money I made from my MMO experience to enhance our understanding of the concept and become the best at it, there by continuing to produce MMOs far more superior then others who branch their efforts.

Not meaning to sound callous or rude, but on the one hand you state companies have no venture capital and cannot take risks then you state that companies can make a lot of money in a MMO if done right, proceeding on to say if I had 10-20 Million would I risk it on a questionable project.

Well to this I say, if done right means following a industry standard, proven concept, or trend just so I can make money for future endorsements on a project unrelated to my current field of work, or so that I can enhance my business posture with stockholders, and strengthen my portfolio so I can be bought out. I think I’d opt to be a leader in the field instead, I realize that’s easy to say sitting from the cheap seats but how else can one make a game that can compete? You don’t get to be the best by following the pack, you can’t be Alpha Dog by being a Omega.

I’m not disagreeing with you completely, I’m just seeing a different picture on the other side. A community and a game are linked and most games fail because the community fails due to lack of social enhancing mechanics or restrictive play which limits interaction to grind scenarios based off of item-centric quest based play or care bear for those familiar with the term.

Lastly, before I get called on it, since game designers I’ve spoke with in the past always do, quest based game play is by my definition a game designed from the ground up which promotes questing at it’s heart. Quest based game play doesn’t mean a game can’t have quests it means the game design is based totally on it to the exclusion of general exploration and adventuring due to the lesser returns on such activities. It usually required people to meet many demands as far as character design and group composition.

A player may need to be a certain level, a certain class, have certain gear, be at a certain location, on a certain part of the quest, or to have the quest before he can enjoy the benefits of completion, and there can be many other such hoops players are expected to jump through depending on the quest system in general. This form of compartmentalization and isolationist game play means you only see or meet people before or after a quest in centralized staging areas. Pardon me, but that’s LAME, if I wanted to have such an experience I could go stand in line in Kmart.

Anyhow If you’ve gotten this far, and not completely destroyed your keyboard in a fit of rage at my comments, shaken your head in utter disgust or just plain given up on my idiocy I invite a response if your eyes are not bleeding. I hope you’ve taken no offense, and if you have I do apologize.”

DUMP THE TRENDS BECOME INNOVATIVE IF YOU WANT CASH.